Monday, March 01, 2010

The Jobless Millennials

This month's issue of The Atlantic contains a long thoughtful and downcast article about the possible effects of long-term unemployment on the American national character.

One section in particular is very much up my alley: about how the shifting job market and how it might affect the Millennial generation. Graduating into a recession, it turns out, can afflict your income for a lifetime."Seventeen years after graduation, those who had entered the workforce during inhospitable times were still earning 10 percent less on average than those who had emerged into a more bountiful climate."

As my sister Kezia, a 2009 Yale graduate, commented on Buzz: "UM....scary for peeps my age :(" And her friends chimed in , "Schnikies." "i had this article mentioned to me today during a job interview. needless to say, there was no real job being offered."The article argues that Millennials are especially ill-equipped to deal with this unprecedented era of long-term joblessness because of their (supposed) crippling high-self esteem, and because they don't understand the meaning of hard work. It also argued that there are widespread socially negative effects of long-term joblessness--especially for men--include depression, alcoholism, and broken families.

But...I think there's a hole in this logic. It crystallized for me yesterday when I was part of a panel (including this technologist, this simplicity expert, and this social media maven) speaking to Professor Kyra Gaunt's Anthro 101 class at Baruch College. This was a very diverse group of 19 and 20 year olds and we were talking to them about hacking their way through the system to get what they need.

I realized that it's exactly this generation's unreasonable optimism that gives me the most hope for our future. Millennials aren't full of despair if we don't get the "perfect" job right out of college--our expectations are already adjusted. Young men are free from the demand that they automatically be breadwinners. Young people are learning to cultivate other values outside of work, and to take risks to seek work that meets their values. All that time we're spending inventing and building social networks and new ways of communicating with each other will translate into social capital and will serve us to build a society that doesn't depend on income to buy happiness. We will increasingly turn to each other to get what we need and to make what we want.

Yes, we still need to figure out better ways to get people health care and housing and education. The legacy problems of an economy in decline are not going away any time soon. But I have confidence that past performance does not have to guarantee future results. And this generation might just be the perfect people for this time.

102 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Hi, but all this does not consider that "money=hard cash" does not grow on trees nor at the Fed Res.Individuals need a roof over their heads.... the farmer needs to pay the loan for the tractor and needs to sell the wheat ... the "baker" needs wheat for the bread ..... and he needs the cash too for ...Governments to exist need "funds" they need hard cash and thus they need to tax ...Can you explain to an idiot all but Phd Economist where the funds for services will come or are we going to "fall" into a world of the "desperados" (referring to those sci fiction films of a world after some cataclims, where the strongest reigns and abuses)... which is of course already is the rule rather than exception like ... see Madoff but in less than a decade many more. By the way you are totally wrong about the debt bubble and how Madoff got away... with no oversight, but that is another issue just slightly related.The bottom line is that without mortars and bricks an "economy" cannot exist... and an "business of mortar" cannot exits without basic rules and codes and engineering common sense (even just a few, but some must exist to enforce a code of ethics in manufacturing mortar) otherwise even without a "bubble" you will have "house" crumbling. Do you get the jist... unemployment is long term poverty and the demise of the middle working class and the middle "college" class.... the issue at stake here is "democracy" and freedom.... where the bourgousie disappeared so did dmocracy and where this class never had a chance to develop you do not find democracy...It's just as simlpe as that.... so was the American Revolution.... but of course one needs to "anylsis this unique event" with "populist and capitalist eyes".Today misinformation and complacency, along with lobbyits en masse helped by the press are the major "failures" not "Toyota mechanical defects" that have propelled the US into a disastrous decadence of ethics and morals, where religion has "perverted both" these two fundamental elements of a society that build trust! in other words hypocrisy that prevails in all aspects: war in Iraq (did nobody here of Vietnam so much for learning from mistakes and so much for education.... history and economics 101), Double standards... in respect to Torture as well as standards of living this by everbody involved in shaping the eco-socio envoronemnt Unions, Deocartic party as well as the Republicans, Rabbys as Bishops.

Anon has a point that so long as some necessary brick-and-mortar goods are provided by people who only accept the U.S. dollar, people in the informal/household/barter economy are going to need a way to earn "foreign exchange" for dealing with the old corporate economy.

But the larger point is that we're experiencing a major shift in which a shrinking portion of our total subsistence needs require obtaining such "foreign exchange" via wage labor, or spending it in the corporate economy. And a fast growing share of subsistence goods can be produced via micromanufacturing using capital equipment, rapidly imploding in price, scaled to the garage or desktop.

The process by which the average person shifts to meeting more and more of his subsistence needs through such low-capital, low-overhead production (either directly in the household economy or through exchange in the informal-barter economy) is IMO inevitable.

The informal-household sector has always expanded, of necessity, during periods of high unemployment and underemployment. And today we're experiencing a perfect storm in which such unemployment/ underemployment intersects with an implosion in the price of capital goods required to produce in the informal sector.

We've already seen it in the information/entertainment sector. Encarta destroyed most of the market for hard copy encyclopedias, and Wikipedia destroyed Encarta. No sane unemployed person or part-time worker will shell out $200 or more for Word when Open Office CD can be obtained for $10. A DRM-free version of virtually any movie or album can be found at a torrent site within hours of its release. Podcasting and desktop publishing technology can produce the kinds of goods that formerly required a printing press or radio station costing hundreds of thousands of $$.

In the informal economy, we've had for years low-cost, low-capital methods of production using "spare capacity" of ordinary household goods that people already own. If the sewing machines owned by people with sewing skills, kitchen ovens owned by good bakers, etc, were fully put to use, and backyard space was fully put to use for intensive raised-bed horticulture, it would be entirely feasible to obtain most of our veggies, bread and clothing from the barter economy.

And now in the micromanufacturing realm, it's possible to put together a garage factory with homebrew CNC machinery for $5 or $10k that will do most of what a mass-production factory used to do.

The whole idea of "jobs," that's dominated our economic ideas in this last 200 year period, has been based on the assumption that the means of production are extremely expensive and that access to livelihood comes from employment by those rich enough to own them. As the price of means of production falls by two or more orders of magnitude, we witness what amounts to a shift from expensive factories to cheap tools. And the larger the share of production that can be carried out with cheap tools, the less relevant the "job" paradigm becomes.

Of course, as Anon suggests, the guy who sells the flour or the fabric probably won't accept credit from the neighborhood barter network, so it's still earn that foreign exchange.

The three things necessary to make the transition as non-traumatic as possible are, IMO:

1) The even distribution of what hours of wage employment remain, through a shortening of the standard workweek.

2) An end to state-enforced artificial property rights and artificial scarcity, that cause subsistence goods to be artificially expensive (so that it's easier to live on less wage income). The Paulson-Geithner approach has been just the opposite of this, a Rube Goldberg policy of propping up inflated asset prices as a source of bubble-based demand, and then looking for ways to maintain enough hours of work at jobs to enable people to buy crap at monopoly prices. What we need is to let real estate values fall to their natural level so that a person working 20 hours a week can afford the rent or mortgage payment. We need to eliminate the zoning and local safety code barriers to informal production in people's households for the neighborhood economy. We need to eliminate "intellectual property" and allow the portion of manufactured good price that consists of embedded IP rents to collapse, so that prices reflect the actual labor and material cost of production. We need to eliminate all the scarcity rents and inflated overhead of the conventional healthcare system, eliminate drug patents, and all the rest of it, so that the cost of basic primary care falls by 75% or more.

3) The revival of the kind of mutualist, working-class welfare state institutions described by Kropotkin, E.P. Thompson, and Colin Ward, updated to take advantage of network technology. This is a necessity as the social safety net becomes decoupled from both wage employment and the increasingly bankrupt state.

I believe that for the economy to get 'better' in the eyes of most people, unemployment has to come down. People need jobs right now more than healthcare.

You'd think that anyone would understand that. Why all the talk of healthcare, and not jobs?

This could easily be fixed - or at least much more easily than it appears. Instead of printing more money or extending unemployment benefits, why not use some of that money to offer incentives to small businesses for hiring?

If every small business in America hired JUST ONE PERSON - guess what?

No more unemployment problem! Morale would go up and people may start to think a bit more positively about our future. This wouldn't fix everything, but I'm sure that putting people back to work is a big step in the right direction.

The crash does free people to some extent, as long as you can get work that pays for basic needs. What I am seeing now is that everyone is an entrepreneur. If a company isn't paying high wages there's no reason to design your life around it anymore.

I found out about this site after seeing your articles at the WSJ, enjoyed reading those.

That narrow bridge is not just a symbol of engineering feat but also a sign of national success. It bridges people from different places. I like that. By the way, did they use industrial material handling equipment to build it?

The can-do hacker culture you talk about in Millennials has led to all sorts of interesting ventures, from a dessert food truck to an amateur photo sourcing site, among recent grads. Perhaps this shift in the economy will change the way we value different jobs and career paths for the better. Just a few yrs ago, it seemed that absorption into brand-name, "steady" corporations were the main advocated choice for many grads. Perception and value of other occupations seems to be rising now. Perhaps this is recession is a good opportunity for revaluation of "occupation currency"?

Good thing no one cares about the Indians. At least the Norte Americano Indians. I work with one that has never set foot in a class outside of High School, but yet cried about them losing some education money. It was sad. I told him to ride his spirit horse to Washington and complain.

Well, if the Millenials can adjust to the idea of living like their great-grandparents, they may have a chance. Think about living in multi-generational housing.

I don't see how clicking around the internet or using facebook is going to produce knowledge or jobs, but I guess people have to have some hope. Reading and writing is also quickly going by the wayside. It is a grim time. You can read some Chris Hedges if you want the brutal truth. If you don't have money in the family, the chance of making real money for the vast majority is slim.. Perhaps the Millenials can turn away from materialism and the glowing gizmos that they seem to have. Eventually it will come down to I-Pad or food.

The Atlantic is right on about narcissistic young people. Most young people spend most of their time on facebook instead of building real knowledge in a core disciplines. I don't think that social skills and b.s. is going to beat a Chinese, Indian, or German competitor. We are going to lose this global fight. Also, young people today are so fragile that they will have a hard time adjusting to reality. Most of them dream about "being famous" or being on Entourage. They are, because of relentless t.v. images, very unprepared for the reality of their situation. The American elites are already looking at markets in India and China. They no longer need a large middle class here anymore, so they don't care if it goes away. There will always be a few who "make it." Yet the majority will live like in the film, "Blade Runner." It may be like 10% have lunch, and 90% are lunch, if you know what I mean, and with 7 billion people on earth, you ain't nothing special, in fact, compared to most industrialized countries in the world, you are pretty freakin dumb! Go read about PISA.

I agree with Kevin Carson, but feel it's important to take things even further and reinvent our economy based on "time + materials". This is all ready happening on small community projects, but with our ability to orchestrate at light speeds could readily spread nationally if not globally.

Cooperation, sharing, love, compassion, patience, creativity and persistence combined with our current techno-infrastructure can free us from the clutches of our current financial enslavement.

"We are the one's we've been waiting for" and we're interconnecting thanks to the web. Egypt toppled thanks to a Facebook page!

Currently moving up through the education system myself, I see the poor economy as just more incentive to work harder and better myself now. I think others in my generation will see the same. In this way we will improve tomorrow out of necessity. The necessity for us to improve to succeed will catapult our lagging economy.

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